This invention relates in general to efficiently identifying patterns in data describing entities, for example, identifying anomalies in data that is periodically collected by a computing system.
Systems store information describing certain entities, for example, users, servers, or websites. For example, an online system may be used to collect data describing users, for example user feedback. Systems analyze such data to identify patterns in the data. For example, certain subsets of entities may display certain pattern that distinguishes the subset from other sets of entities. Systems like to identify such patterns and report, for example, as alerts. However, the number of different patterns that is possible can be extremely large. System use techniques, for example, data mining techniques to identify interesting patterns. Conventional techniques for identifying interesting patterns in such data are inefficient since they are required to process a very large amount of data. Such techniques often fail to report interesting patterns or take too long to report interesting patterns.